Get Used to Hearing About Uighurs and Other Minorities in China's Borderlands. They're in an Angry Mood.

David Eimer is the author of "The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China" (Bloomsbury), an account of multiple journeys through China’s most contentious border regions, and a former Beijing-based correspondent for the UK’s Sunday Telegraph.

No one knows exactly how many tens of
thousands of soldiers China is forced to keep in its troubled far
western provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet. What is clear, though, is
that those troops are needed more than ever to maintain Beijing’s
authority in regions where the relationship between the indigenous
peoples – the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang and the Tibetans - and the
Han Chinese immigrants who have flooded into the far west in recent
years has broken down irrevocably.

Since March 1st 2014, when a group of
Uighurs launched an indiscriminate assault with knives at Kunming
train station in southwestern Yunnan Province that left 29 people
dead and over 140 wounded, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
has had to confront the unpleasant reality of a home grown terrorist
campaign in the most distant reaches of its empire. Now, it is not
the emergence of another pro-democracy movement like the 1989
Tiananmen Square protests that scares China’s politburo, but the
very real prospect of an ongoing ethnic insurgency in its
resource-rich borderlands.

Little over a month after the Kunming
killings, another deadly incident took place at the train station in
Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. That attack came on the last day of
President Xi Jinping’s first visit to Xinjiang since he took over
as China’s leader in 2012. Subsequent violence broke out in July in
the ancient Silk Road oasis of Kashgar, the spiritual home of the
Uighurs, the ten-million strong ethnic minority who regard Xinjiang
as their homeland.

Like many of China’s 55 official
ethnic minorities, the Uighurs speak their own language rather than
Mandarin. Clustered in the border regions, most of the minorities
have far closer ethnic, cultural and linguistic ties to the peoples
across the nearby frontiers – in the case of the Uighurs the
inhabitants of Central Asia -, than they do with the Han Chinese, who
make up around 92% of China’s estimated 1.3 billion people. For
many Uighurs, the Han Chinese are nothing more than a colonising
power whose presence in Xinjiang has marginalised them both
economically and politically.

Despite assertions by Chinese
historians that Xinjiang has long been part of China, the vast area –
around the size of Western Europe – was not incorporated as a full
province of the country until 1884. Its name reflects that –
Xinjiang means ‘New Frontier’ in Mandarin. Only after the
communist takeover of China in 1949 was Xinjiang fully subjugated,
and there have always been spurts of unrest such as the 2009 Urumqi
riots that left almost 200 people dead as Uighurs and Han clashed
over a number of days.

More than any other reason, it is the
huge increase in Han migration to Xinjiang that has prompted the most
recent hostilities. In 1947, there were 220,000 Han Chinese living in
Xinjiang. Now, they number around eight million, or about 40% of the
region’s population, and they control much of the economy,
including the booming oil and natural gas industries. Chinese-run
businesses hire Han staff, often insisting they are unable to employ
Uighurs because they lack adequate Mandarin skills, leaving the
locals with few options beyond subsisting as farmers.

For the Uighurs, it is the equivalent
of 120 million Mexicans migrating to the USA and taking over the
economy, while refusing to employ the natives and demanding they
learn to speak Spanish. Add in the increasing restrictions on the
Uighurs right to practise Islam, such as bans on children attending
mosques and attempts to stop men growing beards and women wearing
veils, and it is understandable how decades of frustration and anger
have exploded in horrific violence.

Han immigration to Tibet has increased
dramatically too, and was one of the causes of the riots that
engulfed the Tibetan capital Lhasa in March 2008. Now, it is
patrolled by soldiers 24 hours a day, while monks continue to
self-immolate in protest at what they regard as clampdowns on
monastic practises and the refusal of the CCP to let them openly
display their allegiance to the exiled Dalai Lama.

Tibet, like Xinjiang, is home to huge
amounts of untapped natural resources, especially minerals like
copper and iron. Some Tibetans are sceptical about the CCP’s claim
that, as in Xinjiang, they are pumping money into the region to lift
living standards. The cynics point to the way airports are being
built in isolated parts of the Tibetan plateau, saying they will not
improve the lives of local yak herders but will provide access for
Chinese mining companies.

Nor are Xinjiang and Tibet the only
borderlands where the CCP’s control is being tested. In the
southwest, Yunnan Province’s 2400-plus mile boundaries with Myanmar
and Laos have become China’s crime central. The combination of
supremely porous borders that run through remote rainforest and the
close links the ethnic minorities of Yunnan retain with their
relatives across the frontiers in the notorious Golden Triangle have
resulted in a huge influx of heroin and methamphetamine into China.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, much of
the heroin produced in the Golden Triangle ended up in North American
cities. Now, it is destined for the unknown millions of Chinese
addicts, a number growing all the time. And with drug production in
the hands of private militias beyond the control of the Myanmar
authorities, there is little Beijing can do to stop it.

The far northeast of China too, remains
inherently unstable thanks to the presence next-door of North Korea.
The region is home to the vast majority of China’s two million-odd
ethnic Koreans. So many are now converting to Christianity, a
religion viewed with deep distrust by the CCP because of its western
origins, that in August Beijing launched a crackdown on the
undercover South Korean and American missionaries who spread the word
there. Hundreds have since been deported.

Such heavy-handed tactics are the tried
and trusted way the CCP responds to challenges to its rule. The
terror attacks in Xinjiang were followed by mass executions – some
in public at sports stadiums. Thousands more Uighurs have been
arrested. In the most mutinous areas of Tibet monasteries are
barricaded from the locals by the army, while anyone suspected of
assisting in a self-immolation faces a murder charge.

Virtually all of this is happening out
of the public eye. Western journalists in China are already banned
from Tibet and Tibetan areas in surrounding provinces. Now, it is
more difficult than ever for the foreign media to operate in
Xinjiang, meaning huge swathes of China are effectively locked down
and inaccessible. Whether this imposition of virtual martial law will
end Beijing’s borderland woes is doubtful. Instead, it appears to
be a depressing replay of the cycle of repression and rebellion that
has long characterised relations between the CCP and China’s most
reluctant citizens.